The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto, by Sam Starbuck

[sophia_sol]

It occurs to me, a couple days after I finished reading Sam Starbuck's fourth romance novel, that even though I read these novels on AO3, they should still count as books I read! He's publishing them all and everything!

So I have retroactively added three books to my count for last year (Fete for a King, Infinite Jes, and The Lady and the Tiger) and now I guess I'm writing a review for all four at once.

I've been following Starbuck's fanfic for years, under the name copperbadge, but last year he started on an original series of linked romance novels set in a tiny fictional European country, along the traditional Ruritanian lines, and I was like, sure, why not. The books feature plenty of queer characters (and only one of the four is about an m/f couple), a country where kingship is an elected position, and lots of feel-good content. Also two of the four have neurodivergent protagonists.

Of the four books, I liked Fete for a King (about a young king and a loud American chef) and The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto (about two Eurovision contestants) the best; the two middle ones (king emeritus and podcaster; two nobles doing politics) didn't land as well for me for a variety of reasons.

Overall the writing style in this series trends strongly in the direction of quippy dialogue for everyone, resulting in me feeling that there's very little sense of there being individual voices for the various characters. I also find constant quips to get kind of exhausting to read after a while, personally.

I also don't love that the focus is on a royal family. Yes, this is not a hereditary monarchy, and yes, the family is very open and welcoming to providing support to whoever appears in their ambit, but....idk. I think this may be one of those things where shining a light on the fact that the book knows hereditary country-leadership is bad means that I'm just more primed to notice ways in which the solution to the problem is imperfect.

The books are very readable, good-hearted, fun, and happy-ending-guaranteed. But I'm not sure I'm going to keep reading them.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

The Welsh thing is at least a recent addition to the series. But yeah, from the beginning, my perspective was YOU NEED TO NOT DRAW ANY ATTENTION TO THE HISTORY, like, no, do not mention WW2, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. But he has all these posts about how he feels WW2 went, and just.. no... stop... please. Like, I get what he is doing, I get this is part of Romance Novel Happy Stuff for him, like yay, m/m monarchy, everyone is fine with that, and also they're Jewish, but, like. No. No, everything completely falls apart if you say "there's a Jewish country in Europe".

Because meanwhile I'm over here going "yeah so we were expelled from every single country in Europe, like, three times" even before we get to the elephant in the room.

So I have to ignore this part of the worldbuilding as much as possible because it's the price of admission to this series, but wow, is this price of admission very very high.

(Who also? Somehow? Managed to maintain the whole "no last names, we use patronymics instead"?????? And they're elected???? And they have great relationships with their neighbors, and they kept English as a national language to annoy France? I... I....)

[rymenhild]

It works as long as I'm singing "la la la" and pretending I can suspend my disbelief. But. Yeah. It doesn't work.

[sophia_sol]

YEAH I love your and lannamichaels' discussion! I so agree that it makes no sense and I found it uncomfortable to read and I had to do a bunch of pretending that stuff just wasn't a thing, to be able to enjoy the rest, sigh

[lannamichaels]

Have you read the latest one? I just spent a half hour ranting to a friend in whatsapp about it. It's... Yeah.

[sophia_sol]

oh no. OH NO. what does the latest one do? I kind of gave up on reading these books tbh but I'm morbidly curious!

[lannamichaels]

So it's... he's doubled down on the Judaism and done it so badly. At the basic level, he gets wrong how long it is between rosh hashana and yom kippur, he decides son of/daughter of use "e" between the names when you're naming both parents instead of "v", and use the last name instead of the first name, so some really basic problems. And then the more complicated worldbuilding problems rear their heads because he's brought the Judaism back to the forefront and done it in such a way that it's ... so you know where "it's not insensitive it's just unthinking", well, it's reached the point where it's a problem to be this casual. Somehow he made a country between Italy and France that is American Reform and the problems with that just get more and more the more you look at it, and in this book, he looks at it. And does not fix the problems. He doesn't care to put the work in, because these are half-assed hallmark romances that he's asking for unpaid beta readers to fix for him to sell, and I lost patience with that books ago, and now I've lost enough patience that I don't even know if I should leave comments to tell him how wrong he is, because he's not going to fix it, and if he actually cared, he'd not have made these mistakes, because he'd have listened to everyone who told him to slow down or stop or think about it for a moment.

...guess I'm still mad.

[lannamichaels]

Anyway, what he needs is a Jewish consultant he will actually listen to, and also one he should pay, because he's selling these books.

[sophia_sol]

ohhhh that is all NOT GOOD, yikes. feeling better and better about having unfollowed him a while back. your anger is so understandable, as is whatever you decide to do about commenting or not!

[rymenhild]

I didn't know there was a latest one! I deduce that I should not bother?

[lannamichaels]

I would not recommend it, but in the same way that I'm curious to know if other people dislike it for the same reasons I do kind of way. But it's 140K with several extranous plotlines, so it's a slog to get through if you're not enjoying it. (it took me about two weeks-ish? I stopped reading for days at a time and nearly didn't finish.)

[rymenhild]

My TBR list is too long and my spare time is too short for that, then. Maybe eventually I'll be bored enough to get to it.

[seekingferret]

You should read Di Bovo Bukh, it is amazing for Somehow Most of Europe is Jewish without any explanation.

[lannamichaels]

My library's never heard of it. Is there an English translation floating around the internet?

[seekingferret]

I dunno? I read this translation by Jerry Smith, which Amazon seems not to have anymore. And my copy was loaned to a friend a number of years ago and may never return.